The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Caryle. Vol. 33: August 1857–June 1858 (review)

This latest instalment of the collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle [TC and JWC] is, like its immediate predecessors, dominated by one massive but silent figure: Frederick the Great. By the end of the volume, and to the reader’s relief as much as his own, TC has at last completed the first two volumes of his immense study – even though by the end of them his hero still has more than forty years of life remaining. Again and again throughout this collection, TC colourfully laments the waste of time and mental energy expended on this ‘unlovely occupation’ (p. 101): ‘I am in a dreadful ashpitof Prussian genealogies’ (p. 55), ‘nearly drowned in Prussian quagmires and other Devil’s-element’ (p. 238), ‘hunting in abstruse imbroglios of Books’ (p. 39). He had in fact come to realise what with hindsight seems blindingly obvious: that whatever the book’s merits, its completion had become a test of his own resolve, more important to him than its notional subject. ‘Habitually my feeling is, that the Book willbe a botch and a wreck: but also that I must and shall get done with it’ (p. 49). Though he emerged from the ordeal successfully (the book was finished in 1865), its memory would hang over T.C. for the rest of his life.

There is a great deal more to this volume, however, than articulate hand-wringing. Despite his complaints of incarceration in the ‘ La Trappe’ of Cheyne Row (p. 39), ‘writing no Note that was not in a sense wrung from me’ (p. 231), TC in fact presents a more sociable figure than in recent volumes, dining out more often than he admitted, staying with his old friend Lord Ashburton at Addiscombe and in Hampshire, and corresponding with and visiting his family in Scotland. He also began to take renewed interest in external events. The Indian Mutiny in particular often impinges on his letters, superficial though his comments often are. He blamed the army and the government for generations of poor administration – poor, for him, meaning insufficiently firm; he remarked that the army would have made a bad show in eighteenth century Prussia (p. 84) and called for the establishment of ‘a million or two of nativewhite men on the high lands of India’ to maintain order (p. 118). Elsewhere, though not in this volume, he described the insurgents as ‘mutinous hyaenas’. This kind of thing (rather glossed over by the editors, it must be said) prefigures TC’s notorious later pronouncements on the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, and remind one why some of his early admirers found him an unreliable prophet.

Nearer home, TC’s relationship with his wife underwent the usual emotional undulations. The death of JWC’s rival Lady Ashburton in May 1857 had removed one source of tension between the pair, but TC’s absorption in Frederickcreated another, once causing JWC to burst out that it had ‘done me more harm than you have the least notion of ‘ (p. 252). The daily presence of ‘the bewitched artist’ Robert Tait (p. 78), working interminably on his well-known picture A Chelsea Interior, cannot have helped. But as always with this highly-strung couple, there was another side: the playful and affectionate letters exchanged when they were apart, JWC’s unforced admiration for the first volume of Frederick, and indeed her customary resilience and self-irony throughout. She was adept at extracting drama from everyday life, particularly (in this volume) from the changing cast of domestic servants, and at deft and occasionally malicious characterisations: Lord Ashburton ‘plays the part of his own Lifelike a third rate actor’ (p. 59), Morningside is ‘the Scotch Campo Santo’ (pp. 48, 78). The novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, who had for years been JWC’s closest friend, now...